Empty Mansions

goddaughters recall. She gently corrected their manners, watching the placement of every silver butter knife, being very firm that they were not to drink if they had food in their mouths, and to sip, not gulp.
    The lunches were not about etiquette alone. As the years passed, Anna wanted to soak up every detail of their lives: school, boys, their débuts, dating, marriage. Anna gave Leontine a Cartier gold watch for her debutante season and sent her personal assistant, Adele Marie, known as “Missie,” to Bergdorf Goodman to buy clothes for Leontine’s wedding. “She was to me a completely caring person, beyond belief generous,”Leontine said. “You never felt the generosity had a string attached.”
    She recalled, “One day I can remember clearly, I was almost in tears. I wanted Mummy to let me have a dog, and I was telling Lani all this, at age thirteen or fourteen, very dramatic. And the next thing I knew, three days later, a miniature black poodle arrived at the house, with instructions that it was not to be returned. We called it Parie, like Paris.”
    Both goddaughters remember Anna as stunning, mannered, very French, immaculately dressed, trim, tactful, and not at all nouveau riche. There was no talk of Butte or Jerome, no talk of Butte copper or political scandals. There was no talk of where Anna came from either, no mention of Calumet or Quebec. Her French-accented English sounded Parisian to their ears. “It never occurred to me,” Leontine said, “that she was anything but French.”
    The goddaughters remember Huguette shyly stopping by their little parties with Anna, but only once did she stay for lunch. Ann remembers Huguette sending her gifts, but not to her taste: “horrible, formal dolls.” These weren’t Huguette’s friends, but the very young friends of her mother. They knew nothing of her paintings or art projects. “She was a waif that passed through the room,” Ann said. “A fairy light that came and went.”
    • • •
    Once you were Anna’s friend, you stayed friends. This was a trait Huguette inherited. Anna talked regularly on the phone with Leontine’s mother, the widow of the family doctor, and sent her checks for years. After Anna died, Huguette kept on sending the checks, increasing the amounts.
    Both goddaughters, born in the decade after the Nineteenth Amendment gave all American women the right to vote, seized on new opportunities. Ann Ellis Raynolds raised four children, then went back to school for a doctorate and became an instructor in psychiatry on the Harvard Medical School faculty and a professor at Boston University. Leontine Lyle Harrower worked on the staff of Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, father of a president and grandfather of another. She served on the Republican National Committee and worked in the gubernatorialcampaign of Nelson Rockefeller of New York, the grandson of W.A.’s contemporary John D. Rockefeller.

    Anna hosted many musical afternoons at 907 Fifth Avenue, the luxury apartment building at Seventy-Second Street and Central Park. Eventually Huguette had fifteen thousand square feet
. ( illustration credit6.5 )
    The only foray into politics by Anna and Huguette seemed to be in 1940, when they supported the Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, who was urging greater American intervention to stop Germany in Europe. This policy would have appealed to the Francophile Clarks, who each gave $5,000 toDemocrats for Willkie—the largest contributions in New York. Anna and Huguette, the wife and daughter of a U.S. senator, never registered to vote.
    Only now, the goddaughters say, have they begun to realize that Anna’s relationship with them was a bit odd. “It seems strange,” Leontine said, “that so much attention was paid to a little girl. In a funny way, I filled a need, like a surrogate daughter. There was a sadness there.”
    These girls were the daughters of the family doctor and lawyer, prominent but not in the same social class as the Clarks. As Ann’s fatherexplained to her, in his legal work for rich families he was merely a servant. But that sort of distinction didn’t seem to matter to Anna. Nevertheless, Leontine said, it was odd that Anna restricted her social circle so tightly to people paid by the family: the family doctor, the family lawyer. Anna made some friends through music and art but seemed not to be comfortable developing relationships unless she was the boss. Perhaps these friendships showed